September 2010 – Page 2 – Auxiliary Memory

The Fall of Robert A. Heinlein and the Fading Final Frontier

There are two concepts I want to express but I don’t know the words for them, if there are any, and I’m not creative enough to make up new words. If these two concepts do have definitions please let me know.

The first concept deals with being so close to a belief that you can’t tell how widespread it is in the population at large. The best I can come up with is the phrase “belief perspective.” For example, back in the 1960s, kids who got high thought the whole world was joining their stoned revolution.

The second concept is about experiences that belong to a particular generation that are ineffable to earlier or later generations, and as people age, that particular quality of a generation fades away as their population die off. The 1960s counter culture is a good example. Kids growing up in the last two generations have no concept of what the sixties was like, in the same way my generation, the baby boomers, have no idea what WWII and the Great Depression was like. I call this “fading generational identity.”

But these concepts don’t just apply to big beliefs or mass experiences. For example, to young people of a certain age there is a huge identification with Star Wars movies that I just don’t get. To this generation, Star Wars is huge in their belief perspective and it’s a touchstone to their language. It’s like Star Wars has infected their psyche.

Kids today might love The Beatles but they will never understand the impact of Beatles mania had on the music of 1964 and 1965, like I will never truly understand the success of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller on their generation even though I love their music. Or look at the Beat Generation, what a tiny subculture, but their population is dying off, and the only way they will be remembered is a few books. But no matter how many times I read On the Road I can never know how Jack Kerouac felt inside his subculture.

I grew up during the counter culture sixties but I also identified with a very small group of science fiction readers of the times. In my belief perspective I thought Robert A. Heinlein was the Buddha, Gandhi, Einstein of a particular belief system dealing with space exploration. Robert Heinlein defined my 1960s like Timothy Leary defined that era for acid heads. From my perspective Heinlein was a major thinker, but my belief perspective totally distorted my worldview, because obviously he wasn’t.

Now on the Internet I’m finding other people like me, people in their fifties and sixties who have a generational identity with the same 1950s and 1960s science fiction that I have. What we’re realizing is the beliefs we embraced weren’t widely embraced by the population at large and as new generations grow up, with their own beliefs, our ideas are fading. The phrase “science fiction” means something totally different to the current generation than it did to mine.

It is sad, sometimes in a depressive way, and sometimes in a wistful accepting way, to see the ideas of your generational subculture belief system pass away. You realize they really weren’t that big, or widespread, or even significant or meaningful, they were just beliefs you had, and they made life important to you in your time and place.

I grew up believing in the final frontier as proposed by 1950s and 1960s science fiction. Like Christians or Muslims who thoroughly believe Jesus and Mohammed define their reality, not seeing that their beliefs are just ideas to believe in and not reality itself. Colonizing the Moon and Mars was our Heaven to believe in, and Heinlein was our prophet.

I’m discovering two things now that I wish I could put into perspective. I wish I knew how many people were like me that made Heinlein spiritually important to our final frontier beliefs. Second I’d like to know how many people on Earth actually dream about colonizing space. Space enthusiasts are actually separate from Heinlein, but I always tie the two together.

I have this hypothesis I’d like to test, but I don’t know how. I think a small portion of the population believe in space as a kind of Manifest Destiny, but I don’t know how big that group is, and I’m also thinking it peaked in the 1960s because of the space race and because of 1950s science fiction. I worry that in a hundred years that belief-perspective will be considered a minor 20th century fad. Except for a handful of people I meet on the net I know very few people who share my religion.

We like to think the wonderful aspects of our generation are timeless, but they aren’t. They just fade when we age. Not only is my body wearing out and getting old, but so are all the ideas I loved. That’s just another thing about getting old that we have to deal with. And I’m not sure young people see this coming. I certainly didn’t.

With the publication of the new authorized biography of Heinlein I’m afraid I’m discovering that his ideas and influence are already on the wane. But I only have a few clues to go on.

Robert A. Heinlein is the Science Fiction Writers of America first Grand Master, selected for this honor in 1975. It’s very hard to gauge the impact of Heinlein on science fiction fans of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, but if you search the web you can find hundreds of testimonials about how Heinlein imprinted on these writers.

With the publication of the biography I thought there would be an outpouring of reviews that would evaluate and elevate Heinlein’s literary status, but there have been damn few reviews, and most of them have been about Heinlein nostalgia. Typical is the Washington Post review, which is the only national publication I found, all the rest were essentially blog reviews, like mine.

On the net I can rustle up plenty of folks to wax nostalgic about discovering Heinlein as kids, but among my normal friends, most haven’t read the man, and nearly all of them show a vacant expression when I mention his name.

To his fans from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Heinlein sold us on the future of colonizing the Moon and Mars and humanity heading out to the stars. To the children of Heinlein, we all assumed everyone thought space was mankind’s final frontier, but in the forty years since, that hasn’t turned out to be true. Most people never think about space exploration.

I’m reading Packing for Mars right now, by Mary Roach, and it’s about preparing astronauts for space flight. If I had read Packing for Mars right after I first read Have Space Suit-Will Travel in 1965 I probably wouldn’t have embraced the final frontier dream. People really aren’t designed for traveling in space, and you have to be immensely driven and a bit of a masochist to try.

I started really worrying about Heinlein’s popularity in the last few days when I did Google searches on the new biography. I typed “robert a. heinlein in dialogue with his century” on Google and found damn few major reviews. I noticed my blog review was second in the Google listing behind the publisher. Now that’s a bad sign. I mean, I like my blog, but if some tenth rate blogger gets the second slot on Google what does that say? Furthermore, I’m averaging 2 hits a day on my review, from both the great Google placement and from the link I put on Classics of Science Fiction, which usually brings me a steady stream of 40-80 hits a day to various blog essays and reviews of science fiction topics.

This leads me to believe my childhood hero Heinlein is far less popular than I ever imagined. For years now when I visit bookstores I’ve noticed that the number of Heinlein books in the SF section is shrinking. And it’s extremely rare to meet a young person that reads Heinlein.

Now I can accept that Heinlein’s fan base is shrinking, but I dread the thought that the true belief in the Manifest Destiny of Space is fading. But it might be. It’s terrible to have to become an atheist to your own belief system. And for me, I think 1950s science fiction was my religious substitute growing up in the 1960s.

So, what is the word for when you discover your belief system turns out to be minor and insignificant and is fading away as its older believers die off? Whatever that condition is called, I’ve got it. I’m not depressed. I’m just wistfully philosophical.

I used to think I’d die knowing how the future would unfold from reading science fiction, but now I realize I won’t pass away believing in those visions. But then I’ve known since I was a teen that the future is everything I never imagined it to be. I wanted to believe different but the Zen of reality taught me it didn’t give a shit about what we believe.

JWH – 9/9/10

Reading Online: Safari’s Killer Feature

I’m not a big fan of Apple. Who needs another browser after you’ve already installed IE8, Firefox and Chrome? So, I saw little point of installing Safari, Apple’s horse in the browser race. Well, it turns out Safari has a feature that other browsers lack that makes it worth the time and effort to install.

The feature is called Reader. It takes a web page that looks like this:

And makes it look like this:

If you do a lot of online reading this makes all the difference in the world. Now it doesn’t work with every web page, but it does with most, like the New York Times I’m reading here. And it’s very easy to use. If you look closely at those screen shots above, you’ll see a blue button on the right of the URL locator box, and a purple one in the Reader view. They both say “Reader.” If the button doesn’t show up, the feature is not available. That’s all there is to using it.

While in Reader there are five buttons that will appear at the bottom of the page if you hover you mouse. They do: shrink the font, enlarge the font, email the page link, print the reader view and quit Reader. I wished there was a sixth nifty button: Save for Ebook.

Reader is great for reading shorter articles online while seated at a desk, but if you find one that’s dozens of pages, it would be cool to save to my Kindle and read from my La-Z-Boy. If you have Acrobat or a clone, you can print to a .pdf file, but I’d rather have it save to a format common to most ebook reader.

I hope IE9 would add this feature, or even Chrome, because it is annoying to use four different browsers for various reasons. But as of now, when I want to read the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly Magazine, or most of my other favorite online newspapers and magazines, Safari is the go-to browser of the moment. It’s like having a special large print edition that filters out all distractions.

JWH – 9/6/10

Robert A. Heinlein – In Dialogue with His Century – 1907-1948

If there was ever a big fish in a little pond, it is Robert A. Heinlein. Science fiction is a very small pond, and despite all its success at the movies and television, written science fiction remains a tiny ghetto in the world of fiction. Robert A. Heinlein is a towering figure in the tempest-in-a-teapot world of fandom, but outside that small subculture Heinlein is little known.

William H. Patterson, Jr. has written the first half of a massive authorized biography of Heinlein called Robert A. Heinlein – In Dialogue with His Century – Volume 1 – Learning Curve – 1907-1948. The biographical narrative goes through page 473, while appendices and notes continue through page 594, and the index ends on page 622. This is a well researched biography, and as I read it, I felt I learned as much about American life from 1907-1948 as I did about Heinlein. Patterson studied the politics and social norms of the time to put Heinlein in context, and that greatly enriches the story.

Now here’s the problem. Patterson wants to make Heinlein more influential than I think he was, not an uncommon trait of biographers. However, Heinlein had some very devoted fans, who after his death have become even more fanatical about the importance of Heinlein’s work. This reminds me of Jesus and his followers after his death. Most of what is attributed to the historical Jesus was actually invented by his followers. This kind of remaking the real man into a miracle worker may be happening to Heinlein.

I’ve been following Patterson’s work on Heinlein for over a decade, first on alt.fan.heinlein newsgroup and then with his Heinlein Journal. Virginia Heinlein selected Patterson and gave him access to Heinlein’s papers. Robert and Ginny Heinlein had burned a lot of his papers after he left his second wife, but evidently there were plenty left, because this is a very detailed biography on Heinlein’s early life. I can’t wait for the second volume.

Heinlein always seemed such a secretive person that I was expecting little about his actual life and more about his fiction. Instead, Patterson’s biography is mostly about Heinlein, and surprising little about his writing. Patterson talks about Heinlein struggling to write, but mainly in relation to Heinlein needing a paycheck. The book ends just as Heinlein is starting to become more financially secure, so his story is almost one of struggling for over forty years to become a overnight success. Heinlein overcame economic hardship and a lifetime of poor health to succeed and fail at many ventures before becoming a science fiction superstar.

Any Heinlein fan should love this book. However, I think Patterson wants Heinlein to be far more important than he is. If you look closely to Patterson’s sentences, especially in his introduction, but throughout the book, he adds a strong Heinlein bias. Patterson obviously feels Heinlein is significant outside of science fiction and I have to question that. Patterson says on page 15 of his Introduction,

And even among this select group of writers-cum-culture-figures, Heinlein is unique. He galvanized not one, but four social movements of his century: science fiction, and its stepchild, the policy think tank, the counterculture, the libertarian movement, and the commercial space movement.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy this. When you read books about the 20th century you just don’t see Heinlein mentioned, mainly because they seldom mention science fiction. And the parenthetical statement crediting think tanks to science fiction, is bizarre itself. And frankly, Heinlein’s impact on the counter culture, libertarian and commercial space movement has got to be extremely minimal. The logic is almost equal to: powerful leaders drink whiskey, thus the twentieth century was galvanized by whiskey.

Heinlein was a substitute father figure to me growing up. I love many of his books, enough to read and reread them. I’ve read most of what he wrote at least twice. Yet, I give him very little credit as to influencing me. Heinlein was a major influence on science fiction, and strangely enough Patterson’s doesn’t show that in his biography.

Now I assume Patterson did this on purpose, knowing that so many other books have already been written about the history of science fiction, and no book has been written on the history of Heinlein the man. Heinlein, and his hardcore fans always wanted to separate his fiction from the man, claiming readers shouldn’t extrapolate ideas about Heinlein from his stories. I think this new biography will be the Rosetta Stone for decoding Heinlein inside his fiction.

Alexei Panshin’s legacy appears to be totally despised by the Heinlein fanatics because he offended the master with the first book on Heinlein, Heinlein in Dimension, back in 1968. I think its still the best quick overview of Heinlein’s fiction from 1939-1966, but that Panshin book continues to enrage the Heinlein disciples. They see it as trashing Heinlein, even though I thought it was a young man’s love letter to his hero. Panshin’s later book, The World Beyond the Hill, does explain Heinlein’s influence during the golden age of science fiction, covering the same period of Patterson’s biography. Both of these books won Hugos, although Panshin got a Hugo for fan writing while he serialized Heinlein in Dimension in fanzines.

Like I said, if you want to know Heinlein the man, read Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, but if you want to know about Heinlein’s influence on SF, read Heinlein in Dimension and The World Beyond the Hill. Now I expect this will change. Because the authorized biography has finally come out, and especially after the second volume appears, I expect a new writer to put all the sources together and write a new story by story survey of Heinlein’s fiction. And if that writer is well read in science fiction, I think he or she will be the one to explain Heinlein’s influence on the genre. Oddly enough, I wonder if that could be Alexei Panshin? Boy, wouldn’t that piss off the hardcore Heinlein followers.

After you finish reading the Patterson biography, go over to The Critics Lounge and read some of Panshin’s later essays, especially “When the Quest Ended.” Which biographer do you prefer, Patterson, the authorized explorer of Heinlein, or Panshin, the shunned fan?

Heinlein’s real legacy is his impact on the little world of written science fiction. When I was growing up in the 1960s most science fiction fans considered Heinlein the top dog of the field, but today you can ask young people reading science fiction what writers they love and often Heinlein doesn’t even get listed. But that’s deceptive, because those young people often pick writers that were influenced by Heinlein. Those writers are the true disciples and children of Heinlein.

As much as Patterson would like to think that Heinlein greatly influenced the counter culture, libertarianism and commercial space companies, I just don’t think he did. Those are separate worlds and some of their members might have read and loved Heinlein’s books, but they had their own shapers and makers.

William Patterson’s biography of Robert A. Heinlein is a must read for anyone who loves Heinlein’s fiction. We finally get to know the Wizard behind the Oz Heinlein created. After finishing the biography I wanted to start with Heinlein’s first story and read them all again, till his last, and examine his writing in light of the new biography.

JWH – 9/6/10

Classic Science Fiction Books on Audio, Kindle and Nook

First off, look at the PDF report I made: Classics of Science Fiction on Audio, Kindle, and Nook. [Excel version.] What I did was take the ranked list from the Classics of Science Fiction web site and make a spreadsheet adding columns for Audio, Kindle, Nook and In Print. By “In Print” I meant there was a paper copy for sale. I then looked for the books on Amazon, B&N and Audible.com web sites, marking their columns Yes or No.

The original Classics of Science Fiction list was pulled from a database of SF titles that had been recommended from 28 different sources. The final list were all books that had been on at least 7 of the recommended lists. What I wanted to know is how well these books are represented in ebook and audiobook editions.

Of the 193 titles, 143 can still be bought as old fashion books. 81 can be listened to as audio books, 69 read on the Kindle and 64 on the Nook. So a little less than half are available as audio books, and about a third as ebooks. That doesn’t sound too bad.

However, if you use just a Kindle for reading, two thirds are not available, so that does feel bad. Or if you’re an audiobook fanatic, a little more than half are unavailable.

35 books were not available from any source and 35 books were available from all four sources. I made the all sources blue, and the no sources red. Some of the red books might be available from other sources like print on demand, for ebook readers other than Kindle or Nook, or even on the web as public domain.

Many of the red titles were collections, so I don’t worry about them going out of print. Often a writer’s short stories get recollected under new titles. If I saw a new collection that appears to have most of the original stories I counted the old title as being in print.

What’s troublesome is the number of novels that are no longer available. Should John Brunner’s Stand On Zanibar really be considered a classic if no one is selling it? Some of these novels do come back into print every decade or so, so if this list was made again in a year it would all be different. Yet, I would think with the advent of ebooks all books will become “in print” digitally.

Some of the short story collections really should be in print today because they are major collections that deserve to maintain their identity, such as:

Adventures in Time and Space edited by Healy & McComas
Before the Golden Age edited by Isaac Asimov
The Past Through Tomorrow by Robert A. Heinlein

Someday I might reevaluate this list and remove the books that people have obviously lost interest in, and remove most of the short story collections, and titles that really shouldn’t be listed as science fiction, like Gulliver’s Travels and Animal Farm. They are on here because fans polls or critics included them, but I think they shouldn’t be.

I’m also surprised by how many famous SF books are not available on the Kindle or Nook. Do some authors not like ebooks and refuse to let their work appear in digital editions, or are there legal problems, or do some publishers think ebooks compete too well with print editions?

What’s fascinating is some books are only available in audiobook editions, like The Lensman series from E. E. “Doc” Smith.

JWH – 9/4/10

Revised 9/5/10: I replaced the reference to Frank Herbert’s Under Pressure to John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar because Chistopher Carey below pointed out that Under Pressure is also known as The Dragon in the Sea. Thanks for that information. I also found a little know hardback version of The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke. I also added an Excel version because of a reader request.

I also changed the totals in various places. I don’t know if it’s going to be practical to update the essay every time I update the spreadsheet/pdf report.

The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins

Why are YA novels so appealing right now? I know many people in their fifties reading young adult novels like the Harry Potter series and The Hunger Games trilogy. And these non-YA readers just gush about the great storytelling they are finding in their kids’ books. I recently listened to The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, which includes The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009) and Mockingjay (2010) and was amazed by how much I enjoyed them. I was just blown away by Suzanne Collins’ narrative skills and plotting. Nothing was conventional. The story was completely fresh.

I won’t tell you about the plot, because it sounded bizarrely unappealing when I first heard it. But my friend Linda insisted that I get over that. I’m glad I took her advice. Just get a copy of the first book, The Hunger Games and give it a try. Don’t spoil it by reading reviews. Let me just say one lady I recommended The Hunger Games to has since read all three books and has already started rereading them. If you liked The Giver by Lois Lowry or Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, the odds you should read The Hunger Games.

I caught this YA trilogy at the perfect time, finishing the first two the night before the third was released on August 24th, which I got from Audible that morning when I woke up. I’m not sure I would have loved them so intensely if I had to read them a year apart, like I’m doing with the WWW trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer, another story that I highly recommend, also featuring a teenage girl as the hero of the story.

My all-time favorite novels are the Heinlein juveniles, twelve science fiction books written in the late 1940s and 1950s by Robert A. Heinlein. I read those books when I was a teenager, and the only books that come close to their excitement since then have been YA novels. Is that a failure to grow up?

Oh, I’ve read hundreds of adult novels that I greatly admire, but they lack the emotional excitement of YA novels. That’s one clue. Adult novels are great for intellectual reasons, but YA novels are fun for their emotions. YA novels are like roller coasters – thrill rides, and even when they deal with ideas, they are sense of wonder thrilling. Maybe us oldsters just want to feel young again.

YA novels defy genre classifications – they are all shelved together and not segregated by topics. For instance The Hunger Games is science fiction, but it’s read and loved by all kinds of readers, including those who would never choose to call themselves fans of science fiction. Stranger still, this trilogy has flown completely under the radar of most hard core science fiction readers.

The Hunger Games and Catching Fire should have been Hugo winners, but they didn’t even make it to the nominee level. Why? I’ve read the 2010 nominees and I think Catching Fire stands up equal to any of those books. Wake, by Robert J. Sawyer also features a teenage girl protagonist and is a YA novel too, but Sawyer is a big name in the SF genre, and Suzanne Collins is not. Julian Comstock is also about tyrannical government that occupies the former United States like The Hunger Games, and its author, but Robert Charles Wilson has already won a Hugo and is well known to SF readers.

In other words, YA novels seem to be a world unto themselves. According to Wikipedia, young-adult fiction is intended for 14 to 21 year olds. I’m not the only one wondering about why us old folks are reading kids’ books, the New York Times ran “The Kids’ Books Are All Right” recently asking the same questions. I agree completely with:

“A lot of contemporary adult literature is characterized by a real distrust of plot,” Grossman said. “I think young adult fiction is one of the few areas of literature right now where storytelling really thrives.”

Over at Ground Zero they asked what has sparked a YA golden age? They point out that sales of adult novels are in decline while YA sales are growing. They also give more first person accounts of adults reading more YA novels than their young adult children. Did the Harry Potter books get us all hooked on reading kids’ books?

Over at the American Library Association they have their YALSA lists of Best Books for Young Adults broken down by long lists and top ten lists going back to 1996. The Hunger Games was on their Top 10 Best Books for 2009, picked from 86 books from the longer list. The Hunger Games was the only book I recognized, so maybe I have a treasure trove of great books to mine. I didn’t recognize any of the 2010 top 10, and only one each from the 2007 and 2008 lists. (I did read that one 2007 book, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and it was impressive.)

YA lit is a vast area of literature that I’m mostly unfamiliar. I need to change that and go exploring. It will give me something to do in my old age, and maybe even help rejuvenate my old mind. Maybe YA books are appealing to us OA (Old Adults) because we’re weary of this old world and crave a younger one.

JWH – 9/1/10